Content of the Form: Grace Byron on Annie Ernaux’s The Years & Herculine

“Content of the Form” is a new interview series excavating the moral and political meshwork implicit in the use of certain artistic forms and genres. If every form or genre-exercise entails a repertoire of expected tropes with their own often unconscious social history and political function, conversely we can read within the framework of a form a network of concerns and anxieties voiced by the choice of the form. Our first guest in this series, Grace Byron, guides us through the autobiographical works of the french writer, Annie Ernaux. The recipient of the 2022 Noble Prize for Literature, Ernaux's magnum opus, The Years, presents a experiential panoramic history of the 20th century from the situated perspective of an ambivalent bourgeois intellectual who witnesses the triumphs, catastrophes, and disappointments of the arc of the twentieth century amongst the quotidian memories of girlhood, marriage, motherhood, and intergenerational change. Ernaux's characteristic style is diaristic, yet impersonal--striving in its use of the universal "We" to capture a quasi-objectivity on the wreckage of history and loss. Ernaux's formal innovations represent a significant contribution to the development of 20th-century memoir that testifies to a desire to bridge the abyss that separates inaccessible interiority from the universality of unfolding history. Likewise, in Grace Byron's Herculine, interiority seeks out its fitting objective correlate in religiosity and body horror. Herculine is as much a horror story of demonic possession and trauma as it is an allegory of the dehumanization of conversion therapy, the search for trans community, and salvaging a little mystery and beauty for oneself in a world of dogmatic thinking, both mundane and supernatural.

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